OpenBag: Dan Melton from Code For America

Dan Melton the Chief Technology Officer at Code for America stopped by OpenBag last week.

Imagine Doctors Without Border equipped with ergonomic keyboards instead of scalpels. Its like the Peace Corps without the international airfare and the dust. Code for America connects our city and state governments with developers and programmers. Their annual crew of fellows build code and API’s for governments to benefit their citizens on all different levels – school bus tracking websites, public art finders, API’s for loans searches for small businesses at api.business.gov, broadband maps from the FCC and the Open311 dashboard, among many other projects.

Code for America is a new kind of public service. They’re helping smaller governments provide its citizens with better technology and better services. A little bit of code goes a long way.

Who speaks at OpenBag? Anyone who is engaged in transportation, programming, mapping, diagramming, public space and urban issues and is taking the creative steps to push their respective field forward. Or just anyone who is doing something we think is interesting – being that we’re all nerds here, it tends to be tech, planning or transit related.